🏨 Expedia Killed its Chatbot. Booking Built 5.

Hotel discovery now happens across search engines, AI platforms, metasearch, social media, and OTAs - making it harder and more expensive to turn visibility into direct bookings.

Cendyn’s latest guide breaks down how hotels can build a connected marketing strategy designed to turn visibility into trust, direct revenue, and more profitable growth in an AI-driven travel landscape.

👉 Download the guide and learn how to win more direct bookings

Hotels bought AI faster than they changed how their commercial teams work, and most report incremental gains rather than a different operating model. Manual reporting still consumes one to two days a week for more than 80% of commercial teams, which is the largest and most obvious target for automation in the report. OTAs still win roughly twice the bookings of direct channels, and AI search is sending reservations to hotels that have not yet adjusted their distribution strategy.

🔑 Key takeaway: Reporting is the one workflow where the gap between available tooling and actual adoption is widest: 80%+ of teams do it manually, under 30% have bought tools for it. It is the AI use case with the clearest, most measurable payback and the lowest governance risk, since it assists rather than decides. Read More →

The two largest OTAs picked opposite structures for consumer AI: Booking is running a portfolio of parallel experiments including two arm's-length startups, while Expedia consolidated to a single specialized-agent architecture after its first chatbot failed. Booking.com's own brand is deliberately protecting its conversion funnel by adding AI at the bottom rather than the top. Both companies are spending to keep the trip-planning conversation inside their own properties before Meta and Google take it.

🔑 Key takeaway: Expedia's abandonment of Romie is the clearest data point: a general-purpose travel chatbot did not work at OTA scale, and specialized agents replaced it. Read More →

Anthropic collapsed Claude's separate chat and Cowork tabs into a single window that routes each request to the right tool automatically, after customers said they could not tell which one to use. The update adds dedicated document and presentation features: Claude can create, edit and present slides, export them as PDF or PowerPoint, and co-write documents section by section with comments, shareable by link and editable on mobile. It is rolling out to Pro and Max subscribers over the coming weeks, with free and Team tiers to follow.

🔑 Key takeaway: The two outputs Anthropic chose to build natively, decks and documents, are the exact deliverables NYU's report says hotel commercial teams still produce by hand one to two days a week. The general-purpose tools are now targeting the same reporting work that hospitality-specific vendors have been slow to automate. Read more

✅ Canary Technologies: Powerful but simple AI powered digital guest journey platform.

✅ ROH: Automate sales and finance to save time and capture more revenue.

✅ Sojern: Pay-for-performance hotel ads that drive direct bookings.

✅ Click Maint: Resolve maintenance requests faster and keep critical equipment running.

✅ Actabl: Turn powerful BI data into actionable insights that maximize profits.

✅ Eleanor: Manage your resort’s daily guest service related tasks.

✅ Hireology: Find and hire reliable staff faster to fill key hotel roles.

✅ Siteminder: Capture direct bookings, syncs rate and reduce OTA commissions.

1️⃣ The Future of the Guest Experience

Hear directly from operators and tech leaders shaping experience across some of the world's most demanding properties as they unpack how expectations are shifting, where personalization is heading, and what hotel leaders should be planning for now.

2️⃣ How to Bring AI Into Your Hotel Organization

To keep up with changing guest needs and rising expectations, hotels are adopting AI at scale. Dive into Canary’s research to see how AI is driving revenue growth, operational efficiency, improved guest experiences, and much more.

3️⃣ How Your Property Can Win on Google Hotel Ads

Learn how to turn Google Hotel Ads into a high-performing direct booking channel. This ebook breaks down how hotel metasearch works, the metrics that matter most, and the strategies hotels use to reduce OTA dependence and grow profitable direct revenue.

🏨 Marriott wired Spotnana into its CRS with Bonvoy linking.

🧠 Nvidia's Jensen Huang says AI needs no new laws; safety is an engineering problem.

🤖 Event Temple's AI coordinator turns group inquiries into bookings.

📊 Cloudbeds launched a native RMS that auto-executes rate changes.

🔌 Only 7% of 343 PMS vendors publish public APIs.

💰 Booking, Expedia and Airbnb spent $5.37B on Q2 marketing.

🚪 Hilton's CMO left for Target after 16 years, no successor named.

✊ Seattle Hilton housekeepers won $31.03/hr after an 85-day strike.

🗣️ Martin Soler: hotel data is too thin for AI search.

🤖 Nvidia says robots lack an internet-scale dataset for their ChatGPT moment.

AI-powered guest messaging handles routine inquiries, personalizes recommendations, supports 100+ languages and automatically creates service tickets.

👉 Automate guest messaging & upselling with Canary

The best operators don’t just keep up they stay curious. They demo new tools, test ideas in real workflows, and talk to peers to see what’s actually working. That’s how you find the small changes that compound into meaningful results. Pick your department below and commit to trying at least one new tool this week. Even a single demo can spark an idea that improves performance, saves time, or unlocks new revenue.

How do you modernize the technology behind 70 hotels without overwhelming the people responsible for running them?

In this episode, Peter Twachtman, CEO of Lark Hospitality, explains how one of the fastest-growing independent hotel management groups is building a scalable technology and operating model across more than 70 properties in 22 states, Mexico, and Canada.

Lark specializes in independent and branded hotels with fewer than 150 rooms. After growing from roughly 20 hotels and merging with Life House, Peter and his team consolidated the portfolio around a core technology stack that includes Mews, Akia, Toast, and Hotel Investor Apps.

The surprising lesson is that selecting the technology may be the easy part. The harder challenge is determining which data should serve as the source of truth, introducing change at a pace hotel teams can absorb, and remaining willing to replace systems that stop evolving with the business.

👉🏼 Check out the episode with Lark Hotels

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